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[science-iwg] Few considerations from the yesterday meeting
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Dear group,
thanks for the yesterday meeting! It was really informative and helpful
to me.
One of my jobs here at CSCS is to find, if it exists, a workflow manager
that could be adopted for applications like the Material Cloud, the NExT
VRE European project, or in general for the kind of computational
experiments done at CSCS. The second goal is to understand what these
systems need to provide to become the generic workflow management system
that could be offered as a service by CSCS.
That said, I should confess that I “kindly hate” workflow managers that
do everything locally behind a GUI. I found them limited and not very
user friendly. Maybe it is better to call them, as KNIME does,
“analytics platforms”. For these reasons, I was pleasantly surprised to
hear about the Sandia work and their split desktop / HPC workflow
“console”. Also the Triquetrum from the slides (contrasted to the one
downloaded from the Eclipse project) seems heading in this direction.
The second thing I discovered yesterday is that integration with HPC
machines and workload managers is possible. Seems trivial, but WF
managers like FireWorks have a quite clumsy way to do this. AiiDA is in
a better shape, but it is inextricably linked to the material simulation
part. On a different path, Taverna introduced the executable components
as Web services and Triquetrum will have REST services. In my opinion,
this is the right way to decouple the “console” (WF editor and
management) from the execution part.
Last consideration is about how to define and make available new
executable components. I grew up with massive doses of C, C++, Shell,
TCL/TK and Python so I tend to stay clear of every WF tool that requires
Java programming, but I welcome Python and R scripting. From the
presentations seems I'm not alone in this request.
To make complete my learning I would like to ask one thing. Is it
possible to access the slides presented yesterday? And to have pointers
to the public tools mentioned? Forgive me if I have misunderstood or
forgot something from yesterday, but with Socrates: “I know that I do
not know”.
See you!
mario
--
Ing. Mario Valle
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
v. Trevano 131, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (91) 610.82.60
